Religion

Although Portland's Jewish population may be smaller than certain larger US cities like New York or Los Angeles, the metro area has long included several architecturally noteworthy synagogues. There is the Temple Beth Israel at NW 19th and Flanders, for example, dedicated in 1928 (as the largest religious space in the city) and featuring an impressive Byzantine style, and there is the Congregation Neveh Shalom near the Hillsdale neighborhood in Southwest, with its massive Star of David.

But when architect Webster Wilson was contacted by the Chabad Jewish Center of Clark County to design a religious space, he had more modest conditions to work with. "It was a ubiquitous tilt-up concrete, trussed ceiling uninsulated warehouse located in a mixed-use office park," Wilson recalls. The site is technically known as Building 23 in the Eastridge Business Park of Clark County.

If the building before renovation didn't at all scream synagogue, Wilson found himself inspired by its diverse congregation. "What was interesting for me was to come into this suburban, nondescript setting and find this thriving, cosmopolitan orthodox community from all over world: Russia, Israel, and New York City," he adds.

The wife of Chabad's Rabbi Shmulik Greenberg had seen in Sunset magazine a house Wilson designed, and thought his extensive and creative use of natural wood could enliven their synagogue-to-be with warmth and texture while adding a sanctuary, a seating area/lobby, a large social hall, offices, kitchen, and all associated functions for a community center. (The Chabad community had set up a temporary synagogue, preschool, and offices in another end of the building. ) "I basically had twenty-foot-high concrete walls and a flat truss ceiling as my blank canvas," the architect explains, "with the charge of creating a place of inspiration and contemplation."

The budget was modest, so Wilson's primary decorative focus (with input from Rabbi Greenberg) became enclosing the space in wood, "using a natural material to provide warmth and interest. The wood walls took on a life of their own and became design features." Wilson says he also took inspiration from Jewish symbolism, such as the "Tree of Life" and the Torah Ark. "The lighting was another primary element to create mood, intimacy, and serenity," he adds.

Indeed, it's easy to find grander and more elaborate religious facilities at any number of locations in the Portland metro area. But what feels impressive here is how Wilson transformed a completely nondescript space with just a few simple moves, be it the elegant lattice-like patterning of the wood walls, the artful cuttings into the wood (in the shape of that Tree of Life) that bring in natural light or the subtle pendant lighting above, or the shaded glass partitions.

It's not to say that one would drive by Building #23 in this office park and be moved the way one would by a historic building. Yet I was impressed by how Wilson did a lot with a little, creating a genuinely warm sense of place while retaining a crisp, modern sensibility. There are symbols nd artworks here, as there should be. But nothing is trite, and that's something a lot of humble religious buildings of today don't avoid.

Given how this synagogue makes its home in what's basically a square shell of a building, I think back to when a former movie theater in my hometown of McMinnville was converted to a church. The Mac Tri Cinema, as it had been known, was itself just a concrete-block shell, but the church that bought it added a kind of neo-historic residential front that felt absurd. As these sorts of conversions go, I guess the best thing I can say is that Wilson's Chabad Jewish Center is the anti-Tri Cinema.

No individual material or move may seem earth-shattering in its own right in this synagogue's interior, but the design is greater than the sum of its parts - a value I suppose every congregation in every religion basically aspires to embody.

A church-house conversion at SE Harrison and Larch (photo courtesy Old PDX Homes)

BY MATTHEW HENDERSON

Recently one of our town's finest church-home conversions was placed on the market. But perhaps as a testament to our continued love affair with repurposed churches, as well as to the sublimity of this particular home conversion, the special church-turned house on Southeast Harrison Street in Ladd's Addition was sold in the time that it's taken me to write about it.

Those familiar with historic Ladd's Addition in Southeast Portland may already know the house by its distinctive appearance. The 1920s-built, former Italian Presbyterian Church has a triangle-topped octagonal steeple with round porthole windows and a bold color-scheme of red, black, white and grey. It remained an ecclesiastical building until the early 2000s, when it was the First Baptist Church of the Deaf. But after fire claimed portions of the interior, the congregation moved on and it was converted to a home.

On my recent visit there, an evening sun peered through the autumn foliage framing its stately facade, while yellow leaves fell on its lush, manicured lawn. Despite having obvious curb appeal, the real treat is inside, where a vaulted, stone-floored foyer gives way to a spectacularly re-conceived nave space, encompassing a one and a half-story living room, Euro-style kitchen, and office, overlooked by a piano parlor-lounge carved from the church's former choir loft.

Inside the Harrison Street house (photos courtesy Old PDX Homes)

Getting the piano up there was apparently a feat of piano-mover heroism as the climb traversed multiple flights of stairs and required a temporary ramp installation nearly spanning the length of the house. (The piano is staying with the house.)

In addition to the piano loft, owners Clay France and Graham McReynolds also added a cross-facing master bedroom suite since moving there just over a decade ago. The original renovations were undertaken by a local construction contractor who converted the church to a residence in the early 2000s with the intention of selling it.

Other architectural features boasted in the listing included, "cathedral ceilings, skylights, Japanese soaking tub/steam room/shower, and taxes frozen until 2016."

Though the Harrison Street church-house conversion is exceptional, two other stylish conversions come to mind, each in their own way embody a touch of Dwell magazine flair while enjoying relative anonymity for being shuffled in amongst other more ordinary homes.

One is a small church-house on Northeast Sixth and Fremont inhabited by Beverly James Neal and her partner Amy, whose home whom I first discovered while looking for accommodations for a visiting friend via AirBnB. "Once a church, now a loft-style home with every comfort you'd look for in a home away from home..." the profile states.

I can attest that their place is every bit as nice as the photos make it seem, making it a fantastic option for anyone looking to station themselves in a highly transit-friendly part of Northeast Portland.

In nearby North Portland reside Tamara Goldsmith and her Church of Tam. Tamara bought the church, previously known as the Miracle Revival Center, in 2009 and moved in before Christmas of 2010; she has lived in the main part of the church ever since.

Church of Tam (images courtesy Tamara Goldsmith)

With the help of her then business partner, Eli Haworth, she turned the back half into an apartment, which she continues to rent out. After gutting the church and replacing plumbing, flooring, walls, insulation, and electrical, the pair added new bathrooms and kitchens to both units. Tamara added balcony windows and installed a 10-foot roll-up overhead door "for maximum access and connection to the outdoors," she explained. She also removed the driveway in favor of a landscaped side yard.

Of the decor, Tamara says: "I really enjoyed selecting custom things that I've always wanted in a home like a big farmhouse sink and interesting plumbing fixtures, and a large wood kitchen island on the edge of a large open central space, which accommodates a variety of uses including a great entertainment space, office and terrarium. I made the overhead pendant lights out of old glass milk jugs and am working on a recycled steel handrail to the upstairs and stained-glass windows utilizing recycled dichroic glass."

There's no doubt that many if not most of famed architect Pietro Belluschi's most prominent and compelling buildings lie within Portland city limits, from the Portland Art Museum and the Equitable Building downtown to a host of churches and single family houses sprinkled throughout the city. Yet for much of the mid-20th Century, of course, Belluschi was gone from his adopted hometown, running the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's architecture school and designing big projects in New York, Boston and San Francisco.

Among these outside-Portland projects, the Pan Am Building (with Walter Gropius) and the Julliard School in New York are probably the best known. But Belluschi's design for the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco is equally compelling and arguably, even more beautiful.

Recently Portland art critic/editor/artist/curator Jeff Jahn, perhaps best known for his PORT blog but a committed and talented architectural photographer as well, visited San Francisco and stopped to photograph Belluschi's St. Mary's. The cathedral was designed in collaboration with Italian engineer-architect Pier Luigi Nervi, the latter of whom was an innovator in the use of reinforced concrete. Belluschi's works from the 1960s and '70s feature a lot of the material, and it was put to no better use than on this project.

Cathedral of St. Mary, San Francisco (photos by Jeff Jahn)

"The Belluschi/Nervi cathedral turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip," Jahn wrote by email. "I'm pretty supsicious of collaborations but Nervi/Belluschi was that rare perfect combination. Belluschi is great with light and rich surfaces that highlight that aspect. Nervi is Mr. heavy reinforced concrete and triangles... the two together are like heaven and earth... what a great commission."

St. Mary's was commissioned when its prior cathedral was destroyed by arson in 1962. This was just as Vatican II was convening in Rome; this allowed the Archdiocese of San Francisco to plan boldly in the building of its new cathedral. That resulted in the modern design of the present structure.

Cathedral of St. Mary, San Francisco (photo by Jeff Jahn)

The cathedral is particularly distinctive for its saddle roof, which is composed of hyperbolic paraboloids in a manner reminiscent of St. Mary's Cathedral in Tokyo, built earlier that same decade. Some San Franciscans felt it looked like a large washing machine agitator, resulting in its nickname: "Our Lady of Maytag". More positively in its favor, the building was selected in 2007 by the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects for a list of San Francisco's top 25 buildings.

St. Mary's also represents a departure that both Belluschi and modern architects in general seemed to make in the early to mid-1960s. As Meredith Clausen writes in Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect, "By the early 1960s interest in white classical temples, expressive thin-shell concrete forms, and decorative structure, which had resulted in a plethora of screens, grilles, brise-soleils, and other shading devices of the latter 1950s, subsided, and design-oriented architects turned toward more muscular, heavy, sculptured buildings inspired by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn...Instead of a practical means to an end, architecture was embraced as an end in itself, a matter of intellectual, formal, theoretical discourse. This resulted in a split between theory and practice, thinkers and doers, those who talked about architecture and those who built."

Indeed, one can see in St. Mary's the "muscular" materials that Belluschi would also favor in later-career projects like the Oregonian building and the Federal Reserve building, both in downtown Portland. If the '60s construction of St. Mary's also came at a time when theory and practice were breaking apart, Belluschi would see this divergence played out dramatically a decade later with Michael Graves' Portland Building, which Pietro Belluschi vehemently opposed, and a work of architecture that Graves - a quintessential theorist - only really designed the exterior for.

Even though Belluschi's later period favoring these heavy buildings is, in my mind at least, inferior to his earlier period favoring wood, glass and steel, there is unmistakable beauty in St. Mary's that does indeed recall masterworks like Le Corbusier's Church of Saint-Pierre de Firminy in France, which famously evoked a nun's habit (her headwear). Belluschi's design seems to take the curving concrete of Saint-Pierre and combine it sculpturally with the linearity of the cross itself. It took time for San Franciscans to get used to this being a Catholic church, and to abandon their washing-machine references. But now stands a landmark that arguably holds a special title: the best church design from a man for whom churches were arguably his most inspired commissions.

Apparently it's possible to live in Portland for decades and still, from time to time, stumble upon arresting, large scale architecture that makes you go, "Wow!" Of course, that which stands out does not always do so because of sheer beauty. But after a bad and unintentionally blasphemous first impression ("What the hell is that?), I can see some value in the concrete domes of City Bible Church. Bless them for keeping Portland weird.

Last week I'd decided to drive up to Rocky Butte to take a few pictures. You can see most of the Cascade peaks from there, as well as the city skyline, the Columbia and the Willamette. The panoramic view didn't disappoint, even as clouds covered the potential postcard-like setting around Mt. Hood.

Driving down the curved road encircling Rocky Butte, I was surprised to suddenly happen upon two giant concrete domes nearly the size of football stadiums. With a passenger in the car eager for a restroom, we decided to explore these mammoth cement bubbles at closer range.

Standing outside in the parking lot of what I learned to be City Bible Church, I was astonished at what, at least in my biased view, seemed to be the ugliest set of buildings I'd seen in ages. The concrete domes are completely windowless. Glass-walled entrances had been built onto the edges of each dome, and multi-story in height to add a substantial presence. But the glass was highly reflective, like some banal 1980s office building. The entire architectural enterprise seemed to be screaming, "KEEP OUT!"

What was this place and how did it come about? My first guess was that the church had purchased some pre-existing piece of Cold War infrastructure: some kind of satellite monitoring station, for example, or another industrial or military need for secrecy. Maybe there was some giant computer that took up the whole dome in the 1960s or '70s but could be the size of a laptop today.

As it happens, though, City Bible Church built the domes themselves, in 1991.

"We bought the property in 1981 and, as a church, you're not getting a big loan," explained pastor Robert Jamison in a phone interview. "Interest rates were 20 percent at the time. The domes themselves, the exterior construction is very inexpensive. Latex is inflated with air and tied rebar to the foam and sprayed concrete. Most everything was done with volunteers. Basically it was an inexpensive way to get a big piece of square footage."

"That 1980s glass, that was kind of what people did back then," he added.

Sanctuary at City Bible Church (photo courtesy Monolitic)

The two-story dome is 230 feet in diameter and 75 feet high, enough space for a sanctuary with seating for 3000, centered about a platform with seating for another 200. “That platform is probably bigger than many whole churches,” Johansen says. “Behind it, we have a choir room, orchestra room, bathrooms and a recording studio.” A large drape partitions the platform so two events can go on simultaneously, or the platform’s back portion can be closed off and only the front used.

In addition to the sanctuary, City Bible Church’s two-story, larger dome houses a K-12 school, nurseries and offices. The smaller dome, also two stories, includes a gym, a commercial kitchen, additional classrooms and a library. On its thirty-three-acre campus, City Bible Church also maintains facilities for its Portland Bible College.

As I moved inside, it was possible to see what a generous amount of space there really was. There were theatrical spaces, a small expresso bar, and wide-open swaths of space that probably befit a large congregation such as this. And sure enough, when I talked to pastor Robert Jamison of City Bible Church, who had been present for the construction in 1991, getting maximum square footage for minimal budget without sacrificing energy efficiency was the reason for the unusual domed architecture.

"We’re on the Columbia River gorge, on a butte,” explained administrator Art Johansen in a 2000 article about the domes. “The east wind combines with ocean weather, so we do get ice storms – but they don’t affect the domes. In the summer we average in the upper eighties, usually with about a week of hundred-degree temperatures. Our winters are very wet and overcast. Heating is not much of an issue, unless we get temperatures below freezing with strong winds. We use air conditioning the majority of the time.”

Domes have a curious architectural history. Buckminster Fuller popularized the geodesic dome, with its utopian sense of organic space. In the 1970s, domed stadiums became commonplace as homes for sports teams and big concerts, from Houston's Astrodome to successors in New Orleans, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Detroit, Seattle and elsewhere. They are impressive for sheer volume, as well as for how they evoke a very simple idea we rarely think about: most all the buildings in the world are square and rectangular. To see a dome is, for all its concrete, to get the subtlest sense of a more organic architecture that mimics the curve of a hillside or the oval of the sun or moon. Plus, there's now a whole genre of videos documenting their demolition, like this one of Seattle's King Dome going down in 2000:

Buildings of vast windowless concrete are far from inviting. Most concrete domes of yesteryear have been demolished, usually in dramatic, TNT-fueled implosions. Yet precisely for that reason, it's not so bad to have an architectural example of this era.

What's more, despite the "keep Portland weird" mantra and our identity in the popular culture as a haven for goofy, earnest enthusiasts, we don't have much strange architecture. Sure, there's the occasional Paul Bunyon statue here or an old bar shaped like a jug there, but these domes stand out, both literally and figuratively. Pastor Jamison says people often see the domes from airplane flights coming in and out of PDX.

"There’s an instant recognition of the domes, but many people don’t know what we are. A laboratory? An airport facility? What? So they come in and find out," Johansen added.

There is a larger issue to be derived from City Bible's architecture. In the past, ecclesiastical design was about inspiring people through beautiful structures to feel a connection to God. Windows, therefore, were crucially important, be they colorful stained glass in traditional churches or the more transparent, expansive arrays of glass in modern projects like Phillip Johnson's circa-1980 Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California.

Increasingly, though, it's multimedia that has become more the vehicle by which worshipers feel that connection. For example, as big as City Bible Church's Rocky Butte campus is underneath the domes, this is just one of three sites the institution has, and wherever pastor Frank Damazio is speaking on a particular Sunday, people at the other two campuses watch him live via video simulcast.

"Technology has allowed all of these services to experience live worship and church life together, while allowing Pastor Frank to minister from any of the locations, and be viewed live on the other campuses," the City Bible website explains." Pastor Frank alternates between each campus on a weekly basis. If he’s preaching live at the Rocky Butte campus, he will be live on the big screen at the 217, Mill Plain and Pearl campuses."

In the end, these domes are not aesthetic wonders - and that's putting it kindly. But maybe the City Bible Church transcends my or others' notions of ugliness: as quintessentially weird Portland architecture that enlivens the collective urban fabric more than another, even far better looking glass box. And if these domes are successful in aiding occupants' desire for spiritual esctasy, who are we to judge? After all, given that Autzen Stadium is my designated church, I can cast no stones.